I just installed WinXP for my 12 year old cousin and now he is asking all sorts of questions (ugh).
Today he asked if he could make the computer shut itself down at a certain time of night. I thought probably “yeah sure” and started off searching for a way to do it.
I found several good articles on using system32/shutdown.exe to make a desktop shortcut for shutting down, but nothing for putting it into the scheduler.
I tried making a batch file and pointing the scheduler to it, which didn’t work. I tried scheduling a run of shutdown.exe with the appropriate switches, didn’t work either.
I am the geekliest of my friends, so I come to YOU for answers.
I also hear Windows Scheduler sux so if trying to use that is hindering me, please let me know of a FREE program that will help me with this shutdown thing. I have found some pay programs but I ain’t paying.
If your solution does end up involving Task Scheduler, please give me some good instructions cuz of all the neat things I can do with a computer, scheduling a task isn’t one of them
Yeah see I tried that, but it’s not working. I just tried it again here on the laptop and it doesn’t work. The scheduled time comes and goes and no shutdown.
It may be me not knowing how to use Scheduler. Here’s what I did:
Add new task
Browse to Windows/system32/shutdown.exe
set it for 5 mins from the current time
Set the username and pword as my machine administrator (it’s “Administrator” by default, right? It’s the only acct here with a password)
Told Scheduler to show me advanced properties when finished.
Finished.
Typed this into the RUN box:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -l -s -f -t 20
Applied and saved.
Waited till the scheduled time.
Nothing.
What am I doing wrong? :cute pouty geek girl with braces smiley:
I just tried it and it worked fine on my machine. I took notes.
Here’s what I did:
Logged in as the user with administrator priviledges on my machine
went to start->control panel->scheduled tasks and did pretty much what you did, except the only argument I had was “-s”.
In other words: c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s
instead of what you have
Waited, at the scheduled time a little box popped up saying that the computer would be shut down in 30 sec, and after the time ticked off, it shut down.
I can think of two things you might have wrong.
First, XP doesn’t like the shutdown command with the arguments the way you typed them. Open up a command prompt and experiment. If XP won’t take the command there, it won’t take it in the scheduler either.
Second, I don’t think XP defaults the admin password to administrator, but I could be wrong about that. I’ve always entered a password during setup. Make sure you can log into the machine using that password.
shutdown -s shoukd work just fine. You can either point Task Scheduler to run that executible at a given time or your could create a CMD file to do the same.
Also note that system32 is already in the PATH, so you shouldn’t have to type anything in the “Run” box but “shutdown.exe -s” (without the quotes) - in other words, there’s no need to type “c:\windows\system32”
I actually had some trouble setting this sort of thing up recently, and I figured out that it was a credential issue. The command was scheduled with task scheduler to run as Administrator, but there was another user (who also happened to be an administrator) logged on when the shutdown task tried to run, so it failed. When I gave task scheduler the credentials for the user who is logged on at the time the task runs, it works ok. I’m not sure how I’d solve this so that it worked no matter who is logged on.
On his own computer? If my parents had thought like that, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. It’s not like you’re born a computer geek. You trade in your early teens for the privelege. And if you’re not allowed to thorougly screw up your own computer now and again, you’ll never get anywhere.
